Desktop street art

I am not an artist, but I was to some degree many years ago when I drew quite regularly, did many illustrations and painted in watercolour and some in oils. Later I worked as a computer graphic artist for a number of years. While I was mostly doing various types of corporate design and animation, I did a fair amount of experimenting artistically with the computer graphics software of the time during after work hours and lunchtimes.

One of the reasons I suspect I was drawn to street art recently and ended up creating the Melbourne Street Art 86 site, is that it reminded me a lot of the sort of work I did on early computer graphics systems (this is the late 1980s and early 90s I am talking about). The early systems I used were 8bit, which only allowed you 256 colours, but you could create vignettes of 10-15 colours at a time and use shapes filled with these to create an illusion of shading. The later systems were full 24 bit or 32bit, as all paint software is these days. On those more sophisticated systems you had airbrush tools, which are in many ways similar to the aerosols paints most street artists use.

Another similarity is that the colours on a computer screen are luminous, as is the paint used in many street art peices. I suspect this is because some of the paint they uses is fluorescent - fluorescent paint includes particles whose molecules are 'excited by some spectrum of the suns rays and actually give off visible light. So when some street art looks as though it glows in sunlight, it probably actually is.

Having spent many hours photographing and 'curating' street art on Melbourne Street Art 86, I was curious to see what happened when I tried to envisage some art of my own, using some of the 'vocabulary' of the art I have seen recently.

I sat down at lunchtime today and freeform sketched a few ideas. The page is shown below.

I have now spent a bit of time working up some rough colour versions of the ideas I had sketched.

Here, for better or worse, they are.

The first one started out as a idea for a solar system like an eye and I had sketched an eyebrow above it on the sheet above. The tears came quite spontaneously after I created the basic shapes and once I had added them, it seems natural somehow to evolve the image into a kind of cosmic face.

The end result is too dark really, but seems reminiscent of the work of James Reka, which I often enjoy when I come across it.

But I came back to it a bit later in evening and tried some other variations, until I ended up with something more less elaborate.

I think this is a kind of play on ancient Greek architecture and the fascination of some philosophers with  geometric forms. It also perhaps echoes the characters that often accompany the elaborate calligraphic names street artists uses. I didn't have time to create something that elaborate though.

Here is a version that is simpler...

This seems to echo the stencil form in street art.

Urban fairies in the mirror

Yesterday I walked along Little Lonsdale Street, along near the top edge of the central area of Melbourne. I had noticed earlier in the day how many mirrored windows there are on the RMIT campus where I work (the three photographs above). I and had spent a short time photographing some of them on my way back to the office from delivering some documents. I gained a taste of the reflected world during those few minutes, but I was rushed and it was not enough.

I have been spending so much time with my eye and camera lens focused mainly at street level of late I think whatever part of my consciousness is involved with discovering and capturing the world in the photographic frame, needed to experience a certain sense of liberation. Yet somehow photographing aspects of the city above eye level directly felt unsatisfying, and the reflections I had seen earlier were still intriguing me.

Reflections are always less bright than their original twins, and they are a kind of illusion, so in a sense it is a little strange that I might try to find liberation in them... or was I seeking escape?

But I suppose mirrored surfaces also transmit a sense of expanded dimension and of angles and views that cannot be otherwise experienced from where one is standing. This is especially the case with reflections in mirrored glass high up on tall buildings; sometimes there is a sense as though one can see what only a soaring bird might see.

There were many examples of reflections, both closer to the ground and upon surfaces a dizzy distance above the head along Little Lonsdale Street and I hungrily sought them as I progressed from east to west across the city.

There are a selection of the photographs I took below.

When I look at most of them I experience a warm feeling of intrigue and even a little dash of mischievousness.  I cannot quite explain why, but somehow it feels as though these are photographs of fairies or unidentified and mysterious beings, not precise lines of architecture and inanimate artificial surfaces.

But then, the glass is not perfect and the reflections shimmer and even sparkle at times. The city may not have any fairies and magical beings, but in these reflections, for me at least, are glimpses of a city that has.

A scientific synergy that is like Christmas morning

Synergy is one of those words that sounds almost wonderfully onomatopoeic in a shiny abstract sort of way, and it should really be quite a wonderful word given it means to bring often unrelated things together, to make more in the whole than existed in the components. Indeed, in the contemporary sense it can also be used to describe emergent properties that could not have been predicted from the ingredients and might be something entirely new and surprising.

The process of creativity is in many respects one of synergy.

Nevertheless, if you have worked in the corporate world as I have, you have probably heard the word 'synergy' a fair bit, and If you have worked in the corporate world long enough you might well get rather fed up of hearing it at all. Rather like words such as "proactive' it gets used to the point where it becomes a kind of beads and bells mantra for folks in suits that is more about corporate mysticism that corporate strategy.

But let's forget the corporate world and synergies of teams and markets and all that. In fact, for a short period let's forget people other than oneself, or at least a self.

Synergies most certainly happen in and to people.

For some reason I have found there seem to be periods - in my life at least - where synergies happen rather more often than in other more lacklustre or mundane personal eras. For me, one of them is going on around about now. I wrote about an example in a post or so back; I wanted to take some photographs, get some exercise and had some vague notions of doing some projects, community and commercial based, during 2013 -  but wasn't quite sure exactly what.

Somehow or other, by wandering around Melbourne taking photographs and gradually more and more of Street art, I ended up quite spontaneously creating a entire website around the concept of a guide to Melbourne Street art on the 86 tram route. I also developed some budding skills in photography and a mild but functional level of fitness I very much doubt I would have if I had set out to do so intentionally - at least during the same relatively short period of time.

Wether a little me in my unconscious put these elements together with a quiet sense of purpose, I couldn't entirely say, but it doesn't seem unlikely there was a bit of that going on. Like many who have spent a significant proportion of their lives working on and writing novels, I am very used to taking images, themes, threads of experience and imagination and gradually weaving them into the whole interconnected system of ideas and meaning that is a finished novel. And no novel you work on turns out quite how you imagine it might when you first set out to develop and write it.

I may not have planned consciously to create a website and get enough exercise to loose weight and develop a particular sort of project I had never done before, but those desires were definitely there and it's not that unlikely I unconsciously figured out a way of putting all those elements together to generate a whole that pulled me forward. rather than saw me pushing and grunting ineffectually from behind.

Yet there is another example of a synergy that has been happening to me more recently that I can quite certainly say I did not engineer unconsciously or otherwise. It is something I rather enjoy because it indulges that fond personal Christmas morning streak of "may be there is magic in the world after all".

It is an example of a synergy between what I do for kicks - writing novels - and what I have ended up recently doing for a living for some of my professional time at least- market research for technology commercialisation.

To give a bit of context first - I was struggling over the past two or three years to learn more general science, physics in particular, as I have to develop some fairly complex but plausible science fiction idea for a novel I am working on - The Devil's PA, in which a young woman develops superpowers, but powers based on advanced manipulation of reality by a kind of wish fulfilling consciousness technology.  Towards this I have been poking at Wikipedia articles on energy and such, and bits and pieces of popular science books and more recently trying to make my way through a giant text book on the natural sciences called The Material World. I was getting there slowly, but It was proving slow going and it was all feeling a bit like the sort of homework I might want to avoid getting down to doing by playing computer games.

It so happened however, that part of my new job is to do market research reports on patented technical and scientific inventions. To be able to figure out what markets an invention might be suitable for and the sort of opportunities and hurdles it faces out there, I do have to understand a reasonable amount of the science behind the invention. There is no flicking over to wander around picking flowers in a computer game world at work, I have to get down to it and figure it all out. And though it is tough going at first, it becomes more and more enjoyable as it goes.

The synergy - what seems to be happening anyway, is that rather than having to plough through that impossible text book, different market research projects are intersecting various branches of natural science at angles and beginning to build up the general framework of scientific knowledge essential to refine the ideas for the novel. 

I only realised it today, but boy did I smile when I did - may be not quite the same as I might have on Christmas morning when I was young, but not far from it.

A consumable with a major impact

Slow motion bullet through various objects from Youtube

I have had this little snippet of the beginning of a post sitting around for weeks. Rather than develop it into a full post, it just felt like time to fire it off - shooting from the hip, so to speak.

Bullet points:

• silver bullet
• take a bullet
• bite the bullet
• faster than a speeding bullet
• bullet time
• magic bullet
• calibre
• bullet point
• dodge a bullet
• bullet proof...

...except none of us are.

Estimated number of bullet produced each year: 12 billion
Value of global ammunition trade each year: US$4 billion

Source: Oxfam


This final view clip isn't pretty like the one above, but I don't suppose it is beyond being important to remember that bullets might be used to shoot at deer and bottles, but those are not the uses for which they were principally designed.

Warning, extremely graphic scene of bodily harm:

Fun with Photography

I have added a new Photography page to the site. It has a selection of the photographs I have taken since first setting out with a small digital camera last November. Here are a selection of the photos that appear on the page.

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The path less traveled

It's a peculiar thing that I know is not particular to me. I have been reflecting on it lately, after spending many evenings and weekends exploring Melbourne for the Melbourne Street Art 86 blog... though I started work on this post just after Christmas, which is when I took the accompanying photographs.

'It' doesn't really have a name as far as I know - the tendency many of us have to follow certain patterns in our day, specifically certain paths through the geography of the paces in which we live or work, or spend our free time. There may be many ways to reach a point in space, a shop, or train station or even the front door of a friend, yet it seems typical to fall into a groove and favour one particular path. There may even be times when it is quicker to take a slightly different route, but something about that may seem uncomfortable or jarring.

I suspect it is part of the way that our brains seems to favour actions that can be taken on autopilot, that can allow the unconscious mind, in an apparently effortless fashion, to manage the business of getting about, while the rest of our consciousness can be involved in crucial matters such as making sense out of the the unfolding narrative of our lives, or thinking about a great deal of nothing much at all. A familiar path does not require decisions to be made, and also does not require new information to be processed. It is a useful laziness of a kind perhaps.

The interesting thing, which I certainly hadn't been doing enough of until recently, is when you take a different path.

It doesn't have to be anything that radical necessarily; I have certainly found that walking up, rather than down, a street I know well can make it a different landscape. Doing this sort of thing you may well see a shop or business you never quite noticed before, and when it comes to what lies in the distance, the great multiplier of perspective can present a completely different vista - impressions of a place a few kilometers away from where one is, and many kilometers away from where one would be looking if travelling in the opposite direction.

It can be healthy I think to break these patterns from time to time. It can have a quite wonderful and liberating effect on the state of one's consciousness, or open up different perspectives on one's self, as much as on the physical landscape. Probably this is one of the reasons people travel, but you don't necessarily have to travel that far to have the experience.

Not long ago a friend told me about a place not far from where I live from which it was possible to see quite a bit of the city. I had imagined it to be a bit of a hike and a significant departure from my usual paths through the Melbourne suburb of Northcote. During the Christmas holidays, that great recent liberator of my daily habits - my digital camera - encouraged me to go a find it.

To my great surprise, it was only a couple of minutes beyond the rear entrance of the shopping centre I have been visiting frequently week by week, since I moved to the area. When I finally went there, I felt a kind of foolishness, at never having bothered to explore just a stones throw from Kmart and Coles and other retail outlets in the controlled coolness of the shopping complex. What I found was a park that felt to me like a kind of discovery of another world just beyond that familiar to me.

There are times when taking the path less traveled is a fertile decision, though naturally some paths must lead to a blind alley. I suppose it is really a kind of metaphor, an attitude to oneself, and the surprises encountered in the landscape without are the fruit of being willing to admit new possibilities within.

The car park behind the shopping centre, with the hill that dominates the park beyond 

Cycle path along the bottom edge

The avenue of tree leading up to the ascent

Couples lazing among the trees and beyond

Believe it or not, this perculiarity is an ANZAC war memorial

Vista looking east from the summit of the hill - with the Dandenongs along the horizon , they are 40km away from Melbourne

The skycrapers of Melbourne to the south

Looking back at the familiar territory of shopping centre

The Dark Side of the Moon

I have been reading Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth, by Andrew Smith, a book about the Apollo moon landings and the astronauts who flew either to the moon, or walked upon it. I haven't finished it yet, but I feel the book has a well deserved reputation.

There is quite a bit of material for reflection and comment in the book, but one thing struck me. Each moon landing involved three astronauts. Two went down in the lunar module and one had to remain to oversee the the Apollo spacecraft and docking upon the return of the moon walkers.

The astronauts who actually walked upon the moon have been able to make a much better income from their celebrity status in the decades since the moon landings. The pilots who remained have largely struggled to do so.

The ironic thing is that one who remained behind were the more experienced of the three, who the program director felt were best trusted for a responsible and potentially difficult role.

This seems to me a rather familiar sort of issue with the focus of the public eye - it is perhaps on the idea of what these men did, more than what they actually achieved or experienced. One thing Smith points out, which is a fascinating; the men left behind on each moonwalk mission got to experience something unique in its own way - during the orbit of the Apollo spacecraft around the dark side of the moon they became the most solitary human beings in history. They were a quarter of a million miles from the earth, utterly cut off from communication and in the shadow of the moon with deep space and infinity beyond.

It may not have been as spectacular as the experience of walking upon the surface of another body in the solar system, but perhaps it was (and some of those who experienced it, describe its qualities in the book)... while we can more easily identify with the moon walkers and have seen footage of them striding high and kicking up moon dust, the experience of those men on the dark side of the moon was utterly private and unknown to the eyes of the world. Sometimes such things have a greater dimension than the obvious thrills.

I don't suppose we really live in a civlisation where it is typical to celebrate something unique known only within the consciousness of one man so far from us all experiencing one of the ultimate explorations into the unknown.